Author: Mike Harvey
The Five Cs for the Remote Workforce
75% of small to medium sized business owners say they’ll continue remote work options long term. Tech firm CMHWorks was already 100% remote before COVID. How did it work during the crisis? At CMHWorks we reviewed the impact of the changes in the business landscape and resoundingly agreed the following concepts were keys for us in 2020 and will continue to be in 2021.Here’s what we found.
The Five C’s of 2020
If you take away nothing else from 2020, here are five considerations we call the Five Cs we suggest every business consider in its 2020 strategy planning:
- Culture– Having everyone engaged is critical. Think about all the employee issues managers deal with. Now consider dealing with those issues day-to-day with staff you don’t often (or ever) meet with in-person. Moreover, your company’s ability to instill or maintain the cultural vision, principles and behaviors when your staff is rarely, if ever, physically together in critical.
- Controls– All policies, practices and procedures need to be reviewed and brought in line with the remote reality. Address these things now or address them in mediation later.
- Costs– Cost control is critical. Give no one a blank check for equipment, software, subscription services, etc. Have your team devise best practices and how to implement well considered goals.
- Customers– Don’t forget your clients/customers. Access to staff may be altered greatly. Clients accustomed to face-to-face dialog may balk at using video chat. Be understanding of their needs and explain the purpose of new measures. Stress relevant benefits such as drive time savings.
- Cyber Security– Implement stringent and appropriate cyber security protocols to protect your intellectual property. Your business’s assets and communications are at more risk than ever before, not due to the pandemic, but due to internationals corporate espionage primarily at the hands of bad actors like China and Russia.
Key Takeaways
Make no mistake, a remote workforce can produce significant challenges to the execution of day-to-day operations if not designed and managed correctly. Approach these challenges now, not when the company drives off the rails of common internet security practice.
All of these are shared challenges. Your competition must deal with them as well. Therein you can also find opportunity. Protect your staff and assets. Value your customers. Be smart about communication technology and do business in the ways of tomorrow. One thing for sure. “we’ve always done it this way” should never be spoken in a company meeting ever again.
Project Management As a Service – Part 2
What types of projects benefit most from Project Management Service?
The list of projects undertaken by an SMB that can benefit from dedicated, professional Project Management services is growing for a number of reasons. They include digital transformations pushing companies into technical areas for which they lack in-house skills. Another is the demand for leaner business operations, greater accountability and cost efficiency. Acquiring Project Management services is also a good idea when the delivery and goals of a project have a very specific or tight window of opportunity.
Read the entire Article on Medium here.
Project Management As a Service – Part 1
Business Owners and executives of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) have great instincts. They see the big picture, the competitive landscape, and manifest business courage to propel their objectives. They evolve ideas, evaluate the inputs and outputs required to achieve them, look for flaws, until eventually one stands out as extremely compelling.
Click the link below to see Part 1 of our Project Management as a Service series on Medium.
InfoSec Essentials on A Budget — Part 2 of 2
Part 1 of our information security article focused on defining and discussing the importance of a proper security posture for small and medium-sized businesses. Now let’s review the potential costs of doing so.
Is infosec possible for budget-minded businesses?
If hiring a full-time chief information security officer (CISO) or information security analyst is too expensive, and employees don’t have the time or knowledge to handle infosec themselves, what are SMBs to do? Some mistakenly believe that moving their IT operations to a public cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft Azure will take security problems off their plate. This is because many cloud hosting providers have some security and compliance features built in. But are they enough to fully satisfy the standards of actual clients?
Read the entire article on Medium.
InfoSec Essentials on A Budget – Part 1 of 2
The IT Security fears that keep companies up at night are particularly pressing lately in the area of information security — commonly referred to as infosec — which primarily revolves around securing data from unauthorized access. An ever-expanding attack surface, novel threat types, high-profile data breaches in the news and new privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA have many companies questioning whether they have their infosec act together.
In an exacerbating twist, the escalating squeeze on data security and compliance comes at a time when data analytics to improve marketing, sales and product strategies is all the rage. Many are suddenly unsure about what is okay and not okay in terms of customer data use considering the new privacy legislation. Needing kid gloves to handle data isn’t just the problem of companies in sectors like healthcare and financial services anymore. Thanks to these trends, just about everyone’s grumbling about it.
Read the entire article on Medium.
Outsource Time-Consuming B.S. to Accelerate Your Business
Why do businesses outsource? There are more reasons than the chorus of “cost cutting” would have it. Obviously, reducing spend may be one of them, but there are many others. It depends in part on what they are outsourcing. Large corporations may outsource key activities, like manufacturing or supply chain management.
Other businesses and entrepreneurs may outsource peripheral tasks so they can focus more on core competencies. There are many such tasks that go into running the engine of business each day, such as: bookkeeping, accounting, call-center operations, human resources, logistics and shipping, and infrastructure maintenance — or, if you please: a bunch of time-consuming B.S. (that is, business services).
Read the entire article on Medium.
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